SECOND INTERLUDE
IN WHICH WE SEE THE WHISPERING SHADOW AT WORK
A young man leaned against the wall by a classroom door in an empty hallway. His arms were crossed. He looked bored. But to be fair, he also seemed boring. He whistled as he leaned, the sound fading quickly in the corridor, for all it ought to have echoed. If there’d been an observer, they might have recognized the tune, but it wasn’t likely.
Then the bells rang, doors up and down the hall opened, and students flowed into the hall, flooding around the young man. Though he continued whistling, it was drowned in the roar of the students, and none of them seemed to notice it or him. The boring young man continued to look bored.
Then a boy exited the classroom. The young man gave a gentle sigh, ceasing his whistling, and fell into step beside the boy. The boy stood taller than him, and was broader—an athlete, a warrior. He wore a stylish shirt of black and red, expensive, a brand name. He wore expensive jeans, as well, hand sewn by a respected tailor. The young man wore nothing special.
Anyone observing would have thought they had similar light brown complexions, though. Similar darker brown hair, adjacent styles, similar dark eyes. Wouldn’t have thought they were brothers, but maybe cousins. If anyone noted them together, that’s probably what they thought.
But no one was really paying attention to the young man. They all had their own lockers to get to, their own friends to find. They gave way to the larger boy, parting around him like water around the fin of a shark. The young man drifted in his wake.
“Hey,” the young man said to the larger boy as he fell into step with him.
The large boy gave him a distracted, almost reflexive nod. He mostly scanned the hallway, his dark eyes cold, like onyx, seeing what he could see in this river of teenagers, with its peridot-green locker shores.
The small young man didn’t seem put out, though. He smiled a small smile and kept pace.
“Oh hey,” the young man said to the larger boy after a moment, pointing to a thin shouldered, shorter boy with faded brown hair, wearing a blue and white checkered, short-sleeved button up. “There’s Austyn.”
The large boy looked, grinned, started moving that way. “Hey Austyn,” he said to, well, Austyn, after approaching the smaller boy from behind.
Austyn jumped and spun in place, dropping a book on the floor, flinching back into the open door of his locker with a clatter. “Hey, Brandon!” he squawked, the look of fright on his face quickly wiped away by the ass-kissing rictus that passed as Austyn’s smile whenever Brandon was involved. “How’s it going?”
“Great, great,” Brandon replied. He put an arm around Austyn’s shoulders. Those shoulders slumped as if the weight of Brandon’s arm was a great burden. “So I’m going to need another batch,” Brandon continued, his voice low, smiling at Austyn. Beside the pair, the young man started… pacing. Strolling, not at all fast.
What was left of Austyn’s own smile soured. The young man paced, looping around the pair in a flat half circle. “Seriously?” Austyn said. “You used it that fast?”
Somehow, despite the young man’s languid pace, he was now on the other side of the two firstagers, touching a locker with one finger, tapping the nail against the metal in swift staccato, barely audible. An unlikely neon green spark shot out of the impact of his nail on the painted locker, but no one noticed it against the green of the lockers. Truly, no one was paying attention to the conversation of the two boys in the hall. Not anyone at all, except for the young man.
“I did, yes,” Brandon said, his soothing tone ringing false. “I have a lot of friends—it goes fast. Hey, what do you care, right? You get paid.”
“It’s hard,” Austyn hissed. “It’s hard to get all of the stuff for it. And it’s easy to mess up. It takes me a lot of time.”
“You’re the best alchemist in our year, bud. Won awards last year. I’m sure you’ll be fine,” Brandon said, patting him on the back. “Take your time. Not, like, too much. I mean, let’s be real, you have a week. I gots to have it before tryouts, you understand. But do what you gotta do.” He paused for a moment, seeming pensive. “Oh, and I’m really going to need a double batch, actually. Twice as much.”
“A week!” Austyn gasped, his eyes bugging out as he stared at Brandon in alarm. “Twice as much?” he hissed through his teeth, doing his best not to let any of the many people around hear him even though he wanted to be shouting. “No fucking way!” he hissed again. “I can’t get that much of the supplies I need soon enough to make one batch in a week, let alone for two.” He glanced around at the other teens around them. “Come on man, this is a stupid place to be talking about this.”
Brandon shifted as Austyn blinked, and Austen made a little squeaking noise as he found himself unexpectedly seized by the back of the neck. “It’s a fine place right now, Austyn,” Brandon said, the joviality just gone from his voice, like someone had flipped a switch to a different setting. “If you’re too incompetent,” and he growled those words, hardly sounding human at all, “To get what you need in time to get me what I need, have a list ready by the end of the day. You will wait at the east trolley stop, and there you will give me that list. No electronic copies. Hand write it. If I learn you’ve copied it, no one will ever figure out what happened to you.”
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Austyn froze, stopped breathing even, for a long moment, staring into Brandon’s eyes, then he made an assenting gurgling noise in the back of his throat, and Brandon laughed and pushed him away. Austyn stumbled a couple of feet, almost ran into a pleasant looking girl wearing culottes. She glared at him and shouldered past.
“OH I’m just joshing ya, Austyn!” Brandon said loudly, with a winning grin on his face as he stepped up and clapped Austyn heartily on the shoulder. “Just joking around, you know, just getting on the same page so we see eye to eye.” He patted Austyn on the shoulder once more and then left him, moving on to other tasks.
The young man winked at Austyn, spoke to him for the first time. “I’ll catch you later.”
Austyn grunted and stalked away, his face lined with worry.
The young man caught up and kept pace with Brandon as Brandon moved again through the hallway. Brandon went to his own locker, and switched some books in his bag for books in the locker. Then he headed toward an exit, the young man beside him.
“Oh hey. There,” the young man said. A pudgy faced girl with her arms full of binders and textbooks was trying to open a door to get in. Her backpack was bulging, overflowing.
Brandon laughed, said, “Oh man, amazing! She’s still at it?” and changed directions. She’d just pulled the door open and slipped forward so that she was holding the door open with her hip. She started to walk through when Brandon barged through the mostly open doorway, saying, “Hey thanks!” as he did so.
A careless brush of Brandon’s shoulder—barely a touch at all, no one who saw it happen thought it looked intentional—knocked the girl against the door frame, jostling her enough that one single book near the bottom of the stack she carried squeezed out. Without that support, the whole structure collapsed out of her arms, the thuds and clatter of binders and books on the floor dull, swallowed up in the general bustle in the hallway.
“Oh man! I’m so so sorry!” Brandon said, his expression much too apologetic as he looked back at her while still scissor walking away from her down the path. She stared back at him, a look of long burning anger on her face. He kept walking and calling over his shoulder, “I gotta get to class or I’d help you out, gotta get all the way across campus to the top floor—” There was no way she heard him by now so he just finished with a loud, “Sorry—Bye!”
The young man glanced at her as he breezed by behind Brandon. Noted her face. Noted the rage and frustration simmering in her watering eyes, the trembling of her lips as she mouthed a curse at Brandon, too afraid Brandon would hear her to let the breath even pass her teeth. He smiled. His work was paying off there. He pulled a liquor flask out of a pocket and took a swig as a toast to himself. No one noticed.
The young man caught up to Brandon, the two of them strolling out across the quad, which was, if not filled with students, then at least well populated with them. Most of them headed toward their next class, while the rest took any opportunity, no matter how short, to get some extra socializing in. Brandon angled north toward the gym. The gray skies above them provided a preview of the winter to come, for all that the warmth of the summer still lingered in the air.
The young man noticed that among those walking toward them was a pair of girls.
One was heavily freckled and scrawny, with asymmetrically cut short red hair—hair red enough that at first glance it looked like it had to have come from a bottle, but on further inspection turned out to be a striking natural scarlet. Her expression became icy upon noticing Brandon’s approach. The one that was ostracized by Brandon’s woman. Well. His ex.
The other’s massive pile of silver-blonde hair was stacked in an artfully messy bun on top of her head. The one in whose name the Exile had been done.
The young man had a lot going on—he didn’t keep track of names, for the most part, unless he needed to for a project. But he slowed, frowning, puzzled, allowing Brandon to start leaving him behind. Those two should not be together. Had the move up to a new school been enough of a circumstance change to undo his good work?
As they approached, Brandon’s expression switched to one of tender concern. When he was close enough to talk to them, he asked, “Hey Megan, how’s it going? You doing oh—"
The blonde’s expression twisted into something furious—despite her size and appearance, danger radiated from her, ineffable but real. “Go shit yourself to death, Brandon!” the blonde spat, her rage like physical force. Brandon seemed taken aback and lurched away from the pair as he passed, a look of alarm on his face.
As Brandon muttered, “What the fuck was that?” the young man stopped completely, cocked his head in interest, and studied the blonde.
Then.
Unprecedentedly, the blonde’s eyes met the young man’s. Her anger faltered, transformed to confusion. He found himself staring into her violet eyes as the two girls walked by.
He turned, keeping his eyes on her. She looked back over her shoulder and her eyes met his again, puzzlement writ all over her face. After another few steps she dragged her eyes away and turned to watch where she was going, but she kept stealing glances over her shoulder, her expression still puzzled, until she and her friend disappeared into the hall he and Brandon had just left. The young man watched her until she was in the building, out of sight.
The young man turned around. He’d lost Brandon. Oh well. This required consideration anyway. He just started walking, watching the students around him as they passed him by, their eyes sliding off of him. He was just so plain and boring, after all.
He started whistling, though he attracted no glances while doing so, like you might expect. It was a different tune than before, possibly somewhat better known in the area.
A pudgy-faced girl with some binders and a textbook in her arms walked by him. Her backpack was bulging. The young man grinned—what classes was this girl taking, even?—and fell into step behind her, still whistling.
The girl shivered.